Saturday, January 19, 2019
Top Dinner Suggestions According to a Three-Year-Old's Eating Habits
A French baguette, but only the inside — NO CRUST
Seven slices of American cheese
A frozen waffle, cooked
A frozen waffle, raw
The ricotta layer of an entire lasagna
Half a stick of butter
Four very specific Oreos
Pizza, just the cheese
Applesauce through a straw
Macaroni and cheese, the “real” kind that cooks in a plastic cup in the microwave
A $4.99 half-pint of organic blueberries
Pizza, just the sauce
Around the edges of a cheeseburger without ever actually biting into the meat
A Swiss Miss hot cocoa packet
One bite each of three apples
Seven slices of American cheese
A frozen waffle, cooked
A frozen waffle, raw
The ricotta layer of an entire lasagna
Half a stick of butter
Four very specific Oreos
Pizza, just the cheese
Applesauce through a straw
Macaroni and cheese, the “real” kind that cooks in a plastic cup in the microwave
A $4.99 half-pint of organic blueberries
Pizza, just the sauce
Around the edges of a cheeseburger without ever actually biting into the meat
A Swiss Miss hot cocoa packet
One bite each of three apples
by Kristen Mulrooney, McSweeny's | Read more:
Australia Bakes
It was 48.9C last Tuesday in Port Augusta, South Australia, an old harbour city that now harvests solar power. Michelle Coles, the owner of the local cinema, took off her shoes at night to test the concrete before letting the dogs out. “People tend to stay at home,” she said. “They don’t walk around when it’s like this.”
It’s easy to see why: in the middle of the day it takes seconds to blister a dog’s paw or child’s foot. In Mildura, in northern Victoria, last week gardeners burned their hands when they picked up their tools, which had been left in the sun at 46C. Fish were dying in the rivers.
Almost every day last week a new heat record was broken in Australia. They spread out, unrelenting, across the country, with records broken for all kinds of reasons – as if the statistics were finding an infinite series of ways to say that it was hot. (...)
In Mildura, Tolga Ozkuzucu, owner of Top Notch Gardens, had the misfortune to be working outdoors.
“It’s been like hell,” he said. “You have to try to leave your tools in the shade. If you don’t, it burns your fingers. There’s not much you can do.
“I try to start as early as I can. I’m not going to risk my body and health. People here are very understanding of that because they know how hot it is … nobody wants to be outside when it’s 46C.”
In South Australia, they declared a “code red” across Adelaide, the state capital. Homelessness services were working overtime and the Red Cross started calling round a list of 750 people who were deemed especially vulnerable.
by Naaman Zhou, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images
[ed. 48.9C = 120F. Wow .. need some koalafications to endure that. See also: The equivalent of one atomic bomb per second: How fast the oceans are warming.]
It’s easy to see why: in the middle of the day it takes seconds to blister a dog’s paw or child’s foot. In Mildura, in northern Victoria, last week gardeners burned their hands when they picked up their tools, which had been left in the sun at 46C. Fish were dying in the rivers.
Almost every day last week a new heat record was broken in Australia. They spread out, unrelenting, across the country, with records broken for all kinds of reasons – as if the statistics were finding an infinite series of ways to say that it was hot. (...)In Mildura, Tolga Ozkuzucu, owner of Top Notch Gardens, had the misfortune to be working outdoors.
“It’s been like hell,” he said. “You have to try to leave your tools in the shade. If you don’t, it burns your fingers. There’s not much you can do.
“I try to start as early as I can. I’m not going to risk my body and health. People here are very understanding of that because they know how hot it is … nobody wants to be outside when it’s 46C.”
In South Australia, they declared a “code red” across Adelaide, the state capital. Homelessness services were working overtime and the Red Cross started calling round a list of 750 people who were deemed especially vulnerable.
by Naaman Zhou, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images
[ed. 48.9C = 120F. Wow .. need some koalafications to endure that. See also: The equivalent of one atomic bomb per second: How fast the oceans are warming.]
The Woman Dies
It was the late showing, and on a weekday too, so the cinema wasn’t all that crowded. We’d seen a badly-made detective movie, and today, once again, the woman died. She was the main guy’s wife. Heard that one before? Yep, we have, as it happens. Though we all sat there facing the screen, all of us soon found ourselves pretty bored, and our minds moved on to various other things.
Of all of us, Kimiko was watching the most avidly, and not because she especially liked it, but because she writes a film blog. In other words, she was watching it with a mission: she had to find something – anything – to write about.
Yumi and Akira, both first-year university students, were happy as long as they could kiss and touch while the film played. For these young lovebirds, who’d only just got together, that was the main reason to go to the cinema.
Kenichi, whose well-hewn physique made him easy to identify as a construction worker, was fast asleep. Even he couldn’t remember why he’d thought to see a film this late in the day. On the big screen, a man-turned-vengeful-demon was speeding underneath an elevated railroad track, causing all kinds of problems for the vehicles around him.
Hiroshi, who had a regular office job, was absent-mindedly imagining things. He was imagining what it would be like if, after the man rushed out of his flat in a righteous fury, the woman who had just died got to her feet, clothes torn and hair bedraggled, and heated up some frozen lasagna in the microwave. How she would then take it out and eat it on the sofa. The gaping holes in her chest rimmed in dark red. This was what Hiroshi always did without intending to. As he followed the story on screen, there was always one corner of his mind picturing the continuation of the scene that had just ended, as if it was a gateway to a parallel world. (...)
And thus the crappy film came to an end, and we all left the cinema. We didn’t know one another, so we walked at our own pace along the street that led in the opposite direction from the station. A cold wind was blowing, the residential area was quiet, and when we turned the corner, we found the dead woman. As we rounded the bend one by one, we each came to a sudden halt like a row of dominoes, almost tripping over our own feet.
The woman was lying face up on the ground. Much of her head was hidden by shoulder-length brown hair, but we could see enough of it to place her somewhere in her forties. Underneath her body was a great pool of blood. It was too small to call a sea of blood – it was more like a small pond. Which, going by what we’d picked up from films and TV programmes, was not a good sign.
‘Call the police,’ Yumi said to nobody in particular. She was pulling out her smartphone when the woman’s hand twitched.
‘She’s still alive,’ Kenichi said, and, as if his voice had woken us from a trance, we all swarmed up to the woman, kneeling in a circle around her like vassals in a period drama. Yumi summoned an ambulance while Hiroshi called the police.
The woman looked as though she could die at any minute. Thus we learned that dying women really do look as though they are about to die. She had a death-like look on her face – an actual death-like look. It was just like what we’d seen in the film an hour ago. In fact it was as if the woman who’d just died in the film had changed her mind, and decided to die out here on the street instead.
Come to think of it, this woman was not unlike the woman in the film. They had similar hair, and they were both wearing the kind of baggy T-shirt and sweatpants people usually wear around the house. This woman had apparently popped out to the convenience store. Close beside her body was a plastic bag containing a crème caramel and a toothbrush. Was the ice-cream container lying at the base of the utility pole anything to do with her? If it was, then the forensic team might be able to calculate the time of the incident by how much ice cream had melted. Akira thought about going over and touching the lid of the container to check the texture of the ice cream inside, but he didn’t want Yuki to think him a fool, so in the end he stayed put.
The woman was looking more death-like by the second. It was hard to say what it was about her that gave that impression, but all of us there felt it. We said nothing, but we were all thinking the same thing: at this rate, the ambulance wasn’t going to make it in time.
Before he could second-guess himself, Hiroshi found himself saying, ‘Do you have any last words – anything you want to say?’
We all felt that what he’d said was a bit impolite, but we could understand what he was trying to do. Taking our cue from him, we all started speaking to her.
‘What happened to you?’
‘Do you remember the face of the person that did this?’
‘Is there something you want to tell your family? We’ll pass on a message.’
We couldn’t stop the woman from dying, but we could memorize her final words and pass them on to her loved ones, or do something to help solve the crime. Just that thought made us feel rather excited, in spite of ourselves.
‘. . . something I want to say?’
The woman squeezed the words out, then suddenly opened her eyes very wide and stared at us. We were scared shitless. We wondered for a second if she’d become a zombie even before she actually died. Her fingers might have been trembling, but still Kimiko remembered to turn on the voice recorder of her smartphone. The last words of the deceased. The woman’s family would no doubt thank her, tears streaming down their cheeks.
The woman inhaled. Her breath made a horrible wheezing sound in her throat.
‘The thing I want to say is this.’
We all gulped.
‘I wish I’d had the opportunity to deconstruct the vagina, at least once.’
The woman said this in a single spurt, then closed her eyes again. Her hands fell to her sides, hitting the asphalt. We were totally mystified.
‘Huh? Her VA-GINA?’
‘Um, sorry, could you just repeat that? Did you say “deconstruct”?’
The woman opened her eyes a crack, and looked at us as if we were a great nuisance.
‘Um, excuse me, but were you raped?’ Yumi said, as if inspiration had suddenly hit her. Her eyes ran the length of the woman’s body. Then we all started looking at her, trying to check, but her thick gray sweatpants didn’t show any signs of disarray. As we watched the woman looking at Yumi as though she took her for an utter fool, we sensed that the pond of blood beneath her was getting bigger. This person was almost definitely going to die.
‘No! I just wanted to talk about the vagina, that’s all . . . Okay, look, it seems like I’ve still got some time left, so I’ll talk about it now.’
‘O – Okay.’
We felt pretty bowled over by her energy – the energy of this woman who could well be dead in a few minutes. Kimiko thought about turning off the voice recorder but decided to keep it on, at least for the moment. From where she was lying, stretched out on the pavement, the woman began to speak.
‘I’ve always found it so weird, how people make such a big deal about vaginas, you know? In the old days, of course, there was a great taboo around them, and women had to wear metal chastity belts and so on. Did you know that? Metal? Anyway, now it’s all about liberation, so people go around saying that vaginas are beautiful and stuff like that, but the point is, who really cares if they’re beautiful or ugly or what? Unless you do some crazy gymnastic moves with a mirror, you can never even really know what your own looks like. Talk about a design flaw! Seriously, though. Even if you look at your own face in the mirror every day, there’s still no telling if you really know yourself, right? If looking at your face brought true self-knowledge, then nobody would need therapy, would they? I don’t hate vaginas, and I don’t particularly love them either. I think all this stuff about vaginaphobia is just stupid. Do people really believe all that? I’m sure they just come up with these big concepts to give themselves something to say – to feel important in some way. Vaginas are just vaginas. What’s wrong with just admitting that? Don’t you think?’
How could we possibly reply? We didn’t have a clue what she was on about. Akira had still never seen a real vagina, and when he watched porn that part was always blurred out. Kenichi and Hiroshi had never properly looked at them either, just stuck in their fingers or tongues or penises as appropriate. Fingers were generally a safe bet to start off with – poke a finger or two in to begin with, and things mostly went off alright. Yumi vaguely conceptualized that part of her anatomy as a beautiful flower garden. As for Kimiko, if she had free time to think about her vagina, she’d rather put it to use watching films. And then writing up her impressions of those films on her blog.
We darted looks at one another. Isn’t this woman kind of perky for a dying person? we were all thinking. Her voice sounded a bit too full of life for someone eking out the last of their strength.
Of all of us, Kimiko was watching the most avidly, and not because she especially liked it, but because she writes a film blog. In other words, she was watching it with a mission: she had to find something – anything – to write about.
Yumi and Akira, both first-year university students, were happy as long as they could kiss and touch while the film played. For these young lovebirds, who’d only just got together, that was the main reason to go to the cinema.
Kenichi, whose well-hewn physique made him easy to identify as a construction worker, was fast asleep. Even he couldn’t remember why he’d thought to see a film this late in the day. On the big screen, a man-turned-vengeful-demon was speeding underneath an elevated railroad track, causing all kinds of problems for the vehicles around him.Hiroshi, who had a regular office job, was absent-mindedly imagining things. He was imagining what it would be like if, after the man rushed out of his flat in a righteous fury, the woman who had just died got to her feet, clothes torn and hair bedraggled, and heated up some frozen lasagna in the microwave. How she would then take it out and eat it on the sofa. The gaping holes in her chest rimmed in dark red. This was what Hiroshi always did without intending to. As he followed the story on screen, there was always one corner of his mind picturing the continuation of the scene that had just ended, as if it was a gateway to a parallel world. (...)
And thus the crappy film came to an end, and we all left the cinema. We didn’t know one another, so we walked at our own pace along the street that led in the opposite direction from the station. A cold wind was blowing, the residential area was quiet, and when we turned the corner, we found the dead woman. As we rounded the bend one by one, we each came to a sudden halt like a row of dominoes, almost tripping over our own feet.
The woman was lying face up on the ground. Much of her head was hidden by shoulder-length brown hair, but we could see enough of it to place her somewhere in her forties. Underneath her body was a great pool of blood. It was too small to call a sea of blood – it was more like a small pond. Which, going by what we’d picked up from films and TV programmes, was not a good sign.
‘Call the police,’ Yumi said to nobody in particular. She was pulling out her smartphone when the woman’s hand twitched.
‘She’s still alive,’ Kenichi said, and, as if his voice had woken us from a trance, we all swarmed up to the woman, kneeling in a circle around her like vassals in a period drama. Yumi summoned an ambulance while Hiroshi called the police.
The woman looked as though she could die at any minute. Thus we learned that dying women really do look as though they are about to die. She had a death-like look on her face – an actual death-like look. It was just like what we’d seen in the film an hour ago. In fact it was as if the woman who’d just died in the film had changed her mind, and decided to die out here on the street instead.
Come to think of it, this woman was not unlike the woman in the film. They had similar hair, and they were both wearing the kind of baggy T-shirt and sweatpants people usually wear around the house. This woman had apparently popped out to the convenience store. Close beside her body was a plastic bag containing a crème caramel and a toothbrush. Was the ice-cream container lying at the base of the utility pole anything to do with her? If it was, then the forensic team might be able to calculate the time of the incident by how much ice cream had melted. Akira thought about going over and touching the lid of the container to check the texture of the ice cream inside, but he didn’t want Yuki to think him a fool, so in the end he stayed put.
The woman was looking more death-like by the second. It was hard to say what it was about her that gave that impression, but all of us there felt it. We said nothing, but we were all thinking the same thing: at this rate, the ambulance wasn’t going to make it in time.
Before he could second-guess himself, Hiroshi found himself saying, ‘Do you have any last words – anything you want to say?’
We all felt that what he’d said was a bit impolite, but we could understand what he was trying to do. Taking our cue from him, we all started speaking to her.
‘What happened to you?’
‘Do you remember the face of the person that did this?’
‘Is there something you want to tell your family? We’ll pass on a message.’
We couldn’t stop the woman from dying, but we could memorize her final words and pass them on to her loved ones, or do something to help solve the crime. Just that thought made us feel rather excited, in spite of ourselves.
‘. . . something I want to say?’
The woman squeezed the words out, then suddenly opened her eyes very wide and stared at us. We were scared shitless. We wondered for a second if she’d become a zombie even before she actually died. Her fingers might have been trembling, but still Kimiko remembered to turn on the voice recorder of her smartphone. The last words of the deceased. The woman’s family would no doubt thank her, tears streaming down their cheeks.
The woman inhaled. Her breath made a horrible wheezing sound in her throat.
‘The thing I want to say is this.’
We all gulped.
‘I wish I’d had the opportunity to deconstruct the vagina, at least once.’
The woman said this in a single spurt, then closed her eyes again. Her hands fell to her sides, hitting the asphalt. We were totally mystified.
‘Huh? Her VA-GINA?’
‘Um, sorry, could you just repeat that? Did you say “deconstruct”?’
The woman opened her eyes a crack, and looked at us as if we were a great nuisance.
‘Um, excuse me, but were you raped?’ Yumi said, as if inspiration had suddenly hit her. Her eyes ran the length of the woman’s body. Then we all started looking at her, trying to check, but her thick gray sweatpants didn’t show any signs of disarray. As we watched the woman looking at Yumi as though she took her for an utter fool, we sensed that the pond of blood beneath her was getting bigger. This person was almost definitely going to die.
‘No! I just wanted to talk about the vagina, that’s all . . . Okay, look, it seems like I’ve still got some time left, so I’ll talk about it now.’
‘O – Okay.’
We felt pretty bowled over by her energy – the energy of this woman who could well be dead in a few minutes. Kimiko thought about turning off the voice recorder but decided to keep it on, at least for the moment. From where she was lying, stretched out on the pavement, the woman began to speak.
‘I’ve always found it so weird, how people make such a big deal about vaginas, you know? In the old days, of course, there was a great taboo around them, and women had to wear metal chastity belts and so on. Did you know that? Metal? Anyway, now it’s all about liberation, so people go around saying that vaginas are beautiful and stuff like that, but the point is, who really cares if they’re beautiful or ugly or what? Unless you do some crazy gymnastic moves with a mirror, you can never even really know what your own looks like. Talk about a design flaw! Seriously, though. Even if you look at your own face in the mirror every day, there’s still no telling if you really know yourself, right? If looking at your face brought true self-knowledge, then nobody would need therapy, would they? I don’t hate vaginas, and I don’t particularly love them either. I think all this stuff about vaginaphobia is just stupid. Do people really believe all that? I’m sure they just come up with these big concepts to give themselves something to say – to feel important in some way. Vaginas are just vaginas. What’s wrong with just admitting that? Don’t you think?’
How could we possibly reply? We didn’t have a clue what she was on about. Akira had still never seen a real vagina, and when he watched porn that part was always blurred out. Kenichi and Hiroshi had never properly looked at them either, just stuck in their fingers or tongues or penises as appropriate. Fingers were generally a safe bet to start off with – poke a finger or two in to begin with, and things mostly went off alright. Yumi vaguely conceptualized that part of her anatomy as a beautiful flower garden. As for Kimiko, if she had free time to think about her vagina, she’d rather put it to use watching films. And then writing up her impressions of those films on her blog.
We darted looks at one another. Isn’t this woman kind of perky for a dying person? we were all thinking. Her voice sounded a bit too full of life for someone eking out the last of their strength.
by Aoko Matsuda, Granta | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Disastrous Decline in Author Incomes Isn’t Just Amazon’s Fault
There is a scene in the film Moulin Rouge in which a crowd of top hat-wearing men belt out the Nirvana song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as they riotously descend upon the famous French hall of can-can dancers. “Here we are now! Entertain us!” the suited patrons roar as they greedily reach out for the amusements around them. It’s a high-energy, campy scene that director Baz Luhrmann overlays with a sinister message about the power discrepancy between entertainers and the men who pay them. This scene has been on my mind lately, both in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the horrific stories we’ve heard from actresses and other women in the entertainment industry, and again on Monday, when the Authors Guild published its 2018 Author Income Survey.
This was the largest survey ever conducted of writing-related earnings by American authors. It tallied the responses of 5,067 authors, including those who are traditionally, hybrid, and self-published, and found that the median income from writing has dropped 42% from 2009, landing at a paltry $6,080. The other findings are similarly bleak: revenue from books has dropped an additional 21%, to $3,100, meaning it’s impossible to make a living from writing books alone. Most writers are cobbling together various sources of income like teaching or speaking engagements, yet the median income for full-time authors for all writing-related activities still only reached $20,300, which is well below the American poverty line for a family of three. Writers of literary fiction felt the greatest decline in book earnings, down 43% since 2013.
The Authors Guild has a pretty clear idea of what’s behind this disturbing trend, namely the rise of Amazon, which severely cuts publishers’ margins on book sales. Authors ultimately shoulder the cost because publishers offset their losses by giving out smaller author advances and royalties. The platform’s resale market also means that, within months of publication, books are being resold as “like new” or “lightly used,” a scenario in which no new money goes to the actual author of the book. The Authors Guild acknowledges that Amazon isn’t the only place where authors are losing out, but the culprits are of a kind: electronic platforms like Google Books and Open Library claim fair use rights in order to offer classrooms products without paying authors royalties. This is problematic because those royalties, a kind of pay-to-play model of compensation, are how artists have made their money ever since it went out of fashion to have a patron who could support your entire career.
This year’s Authors Guild Survey is right to focus on the harm Amazon does to working writers; personally, I’ve made my 2019 resolution to put my money where my mouth is and buy all my books at local, independent bookstores. But the survey results made me wonder if that would be enough—if it’s possible, in the age of the Internet, to reverse the belief that content should mostly be free. By content I do mean to encompass all ends of the artistic spectrum, that ill-defined mass of high and low entertainment and art and news that rubs up against each other on the web in a way that makes it more difficult to separate out, and perhaps less meaningful to do so. Basically, people are insatiable for this panoply of words and images; they want mass input. If you do a Google search for “apple pie recipe,” for example, the top results include both Pillsbury’s website and the personal blog of a home cook. The point isn’t that there is anything wrong with the latter, it’s that discernment has taken a backseat to access; we want all the apple pie recipes, all the videos and photographs and articles and books. We are here now. Entertain us.
by Carrie V. Mullins, Electric Lit | Read more:
Image: uncredited
This was the largest survey ever conducted of writing-related earnings by American authors. It tallied the responses of 5,067 authors, including those who are traditionally, hybrid, and self-published, and found that the median income from writing has dropped 42% from 2009, landing at a paltry $6,080. The other findings are similarly bleak: revenue from books has dropped an additional 21%, to $3,100, meaning it’s impossible to make a living from writing books alone. Most writers are cobbling together various sources of income like teaching or speaking engagements, yet the median income for full-time authors for all writing-related activities still only reached $20,300, which is well below the American poverty line for a family of three. Writers of literary fiction felt the greatest decline in book earnings, down 43% since 2013.The Authors Guild has a pretty clear idea of what’s behind this disturbing trend, namely the rise of Amazon, which severely cuts publishers’ margins on book sales. Authors ultimately shoulder the cost because publishers offset their losses by giving out smaller author advances and royalties. The platform’s resale market also means that, within months of publication, books are being resold as “like new” or “lightly used,” a scenario in which no new money goes to the actual author of the book. The Authors Guild acknowledges that Amazon isn’t the only place where authors are losing out, but the culprits are of a kind: electronic platforms like Google Books and Open Library claim fair use rights in order to offer classrooms products without paying authors royalties. This is problematic because those royalties, a kind of pay-to-play model of compensation, are how artists have made their money ever since it went out of fashion to have a patron who could support your entire career.
This year’s Authors Guild Survey is right to focus on the harm Amazon does to working writers; personally, I’ve made my 2019 resolution to put my money where my mouth is and buy all my books at local, independent bookstores. But the survey results made me wonder if that would be enough—if it’s possible, in the age of the Internet, to reverse the belief that content should mostly be free. By content I do mean to encompass all ends of the artistic spectrum, that ill-defined mass of high and low entertainment and art and news that rubs up against each other on the web in a way that makes it more difficult to separate out, and perhaps less meaningful to do so. Basically, people are insatiable for this panoply of words and images; they want mass input. If you do a Google search for “apple pie recipe,” for example, the top results include both Pillsbury’s website and the personal blog of a home cook. The point isn’t that there is anything wrong with the latter, it’s that discernment has taken a backseat to access; we want all the apple pie recipes, all the videos and photographs and articles and books. We are here now. Entertain us.
by Carrie V. Mullins, Electric Lit | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Friday, January 18, 2019
The Left Critique of Bureauracy
Sometimes my experiences with the Postal Service are almost enough to turn me into a right-wing libertarian. For instance: They offer a special discounted rate for sending magazines through the post. Which is good—I run a magazine that is sent through the post! In order to get the rate, however, you have to meticulously obey every single instruction in the 56 pages of Handbook DM-204, which governs Periodicals Mailing Privileges. There is an incredibly complicated application, and a $700 fee, and a seemingly endless set of potential pitfalls. I couldn’t figure out how to finish the application, so I hired someone to do it. That person eventually gave up in frustration. It ultimately took us a year to get the permit. Shortly afterward, the postal service threatened to revoke our permit (and send us back to step 1) because we had failed to print the contents of Form 3510-M in our magazine.
For every bad experience I’ve had with the post office, though, I’ve also had a good one. There are two post offices within a few blocks of Current Affairs HQ. At one, the staff are consistently ornery and chide you for doing something wrong. (I play a game with myself: “What have I done wrong this time?” in which I try to guess what I am going to be told I have done wrong. The last time I went in it was “failing to fold the priority envelope along the crease when sealing it.”) At the other post office, the staff are absolutely lovely. They apologize to you, they find fun stamps for you, they give you king cake during Carnival Season. I adore them.
On the left, we often talk about the importance of making things publicly owned and operated. But the structure and character of those institutions matters just as much as their being “public” versus “private.” There’s a reason why “Do you want your healthcare to be run like the post office and the DMV?” is a very effective conservative talking point against greater federal involvement in financing medical care. Many people have bad experiences with government agencies, and it’s important to be able to persuasively show that they won’t have these experiences when these experiences operate under left-wing governance.
It is not true, as is popularly thought, that the private sector is necessarily more efficient than the public sector. Some of the most frustrating experiences we have with “red tape” are with private companies—I would certainly rather deal with the USPS than with Comcast. Or have a look at the consumer reviews for BlueCross of California. People spent hours upon hours trying to navigate phone menus whose “options have changed,” and hearing private sector bureaucrats lament “I’m sorry, but that’s just our policy.” To those who think the private sector necessarily provides more satisfying experiences to the paying customer, I have two words: Spirit Airlines.
There are well-run public institutions and well-run private institutions, and poorly-run public institutions and poorly-run private institutions. The Tampa International Airport, for instance, is clean, attractive, extremely well-designed, efficiently operated, and often ranked one of the top most-loved airports in the country. It is owned and operated by the county government. The New York City Subway, on the other hand… well, let’s not even start. The United States has world-class public universities—the Universities of Texas, Michigan, and Virginia, for instance, give as good an education as can be found anywhere. The privately operated University of Phoenix, on the other hand, is run by the Apollo Education Group, Inc., and has been federally investigated for unfair business practices, deceiving shareholders, fraudulent marketing, and employment discrimination.
Clearly the fact of an institution being “public” or “private” does not in itself tell us much about it. The Border Patrol is public and Planned Parenthood is private. State institutions come in many forms: Public libraries are superb, quasi-socialist institutions that do good, but as conservatives love to point out, powerful “socialist” governments often have poor records in many areas such as environmental protection.
A leftist committed to strengthening the public sector, then, must also think about how to have a public sector that is well-run and accomplishes left objectives. Part of this, yes, is simply a matter of funding—the #1 thing that keeps the Detroit school system from succeeding, for example, is that there is little money in a poor city to provide quality education. Funding isn’t enough, though: You also have to have democratically-operated organizations, so that money gets spent well and those who run the system aren’t stymied by poorly-designed Rules And Regulations.
The questions that we should think about when “designing institutions” are simple: What is people’s experience of this institution going to be like? If we are designing a healthcare system, how can we make sure people don’t spend time filling out paperwork that they should be using to take care of themselves? Progressives should be fully on board, for example, with making it simple to file your taxes. Not with lowering taxes, but with making sure that the actual process of filing them is straightforward. We’ve got to think: How do we make government less complicated and frustrating? This isn’t “deregulation”—it’s a mistake to think that a critique of bureaucracy has to be a critique of government’s scope. But it is a desire to make government run “simply.” It should be easy to apply for a permit, easy to look up records. In fact, that’s a big part of how we should be pitching “government-run” healthcare. It’s about making your life easier. We want you to be able to go to the doctor and not have to think about money and insurance networks and reimbursements. Likewise, we want you to be able to go to college without having to spend the next two decades on the phone with the servicing company your student loan company sold your loans to.
For every bad experience I’ve had with the post office, though, I’ve also had a good one. There are two post offices within a few blocks of Current Affairs HQ. At one, the staff are consistently ornery and chide you for doing something wrong. (I play a game with myself: “What have I done wrong this time?” in which I try to guess what I am going to be told I have done wrong. The last time I went in it was “failing to fold the priority envelope along the crease when sealing it.”) At the other post office, the staff are absolutely lovely. They apologize to you, they find fun stamps for you, they give you king cake during Carnival Season. I adore them.On the left, we often talk about the importance of making things publicly owned and operated. But the structure and character of those institutions matters just as much as their being “public” versus “private.” There’s a reason why “Do you want your healthcare to be run like the post office and the DMV?” is a very effective conservative talking point against greater federal involvement in financing medical care. Many people have bad experiences with government agencies, and it’s important to be able to persuasively show that they won’t have these experiences when these experiences operate under left-wing governance.
It is not true, as is popularly thought, that the private sector is necessarily more efficient than the public sector. Some of the most frustrating experiences we have with “red tape” are with private companies—I would certainly rather deal with the USPS than with Comcast. Or have a look at the consumer reviews for BlueCross of California. People spent hours upon hours trying to navigate phone menus whose “options have changed,” and hearing private sector bureaucrats lament “I’m sorry, but that’s just our policy.” To those who think the private sector necessarily provides more satisfying experiences to the paying customer, I have two words: Spirit Airlines.
There are well-run public institutions and well-run private institutions, and poorly-run public institutions and poorly-run private institutions. The Tampa International Airport, for instance, is clean, attractive, extremely well-designed, efficiently operated, and often ranked one of the top most-loved airports in the country. It is owned and operated by the county government. The New York City Subway, on the other hand… well, let’s not even start. The United States has world-class public universities—the Universities of Texas, Michigan, and Virginia, for instance, give as good an education as can be found anywhere. The privately operated University of Phoenix, on the other hand, is run by the Apollo Education Group, Inc., and has been federally investigated for unfair business practices, deceiving shareholders, fraudulent marketing, and employment discrimination.
Clearly the fact of an institution being “public” or “private” does not in itself tell us much about it. The Border Patrol is public and Planned Parenthood is private. State institutions come in many forms: Public libraries are superb, quasi-socialist institutions that do good, but as conservatives love to point out, powerful “socialist” governments often have poor records in many areas such as environmental protection.
A leftist committed to strengthening the public sector, then, must also think about how to have a public sector that is well-run and accomplishes left objectives. Part of this, yes, is simply a matter of funding—the #1 thing that keeps the Detroit school system from succeeding, for example, is that there is little money in a poor city to provide quality education. Funding isn’t enough, though: You also have to have democratically-operated organizations, so that money gets spent well and those who run the system aren’t stymied by poorly-designed Rules And Regulations.
The questions that we should think about when “designing institutions” are simple: What is people’s experience of this institution going to be like? If we are designing a healthcare system, how can we make sure people don’t spend time filling out paperwork that they should be using to take care of themselves? Progressives should be fully on board, for example, with making it simple to file your taxes. Not with lowering taxes, but with making sure that the actual process of filing them is straightforward. We’ve got to think: How do we make government less complicated and frustrating? This isn’t “deregulation”—it’s a mistake to think that a critique of bureaucracy has to be a critique of government’s scope. But it is a desire to make government run “simply.” It should be easy to apply for a permit, easy to look up records. In fact, that’s a big part of how we should be pitching “government-run” healthcare. It’s about making your life easier. We want you to be able to go to the doctor and not have to think about money and insurance networks and reimbursements. Likewise, we want you to be able to go to college without having to spend the next two decades on the phone with the servicing company your student loan company sold your loans to.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Thursday, January 17, 2019
Creating While Clean
This is a story about sober musicians—about the life that has led them here, and about the life that they live now—but there is no single story here.
Some drank, some used drugs, some did more or less everything, and they did so to very different degrees. Some found themselves at the edge of the precipice, or worse; others simply re-routed from a path or trajectory that they came to see as unwise. Some were clean before the end of their teenage years; some only surfaced into sobriety much later in their lives. Some created the work that made them first or best known before they were sober; some have done so since. Some see significant correlations here; some don’t.
In the modern pop-culture tradition, being a musician has often come with a series of default lifestyle expectations, ones of indulgence and recklessness, larger-than-life living, and a diligent pursuit of altered forms of consciousness. Some see these expectations as having played a part in what happened to them, though most ultimately see their decisions and actions as also—if not mainly—a matter of their own psychology and personality and predisposition.
Some delight in a dark humor about their earlier excesses; others talk in a way that suggests that to dwell on these too much, to give such memories too much oxygen, would be to take too lightly something they simply can’t risk taking lightly. That it would be foolhardy or perilous to risk returning, even in thought, to a place where for all kinds of reasons they’d rather not linger. A corollary is that some are reluctant in this context to offer much detail about the particular substances that they consumed, or that consumed them, or both. (Readers may be aware that at other times, in different situations or at different stages of their recovery, some of these interviewees may have detailed further specifics about how they used to alter their body chemistry, but GQ is respecting what they have chosen to share in this particular circumstance and setting.)
Some hew closely to the language of recovery programs; some don’t. (Readers may also notice that some in the former category prefer to honor rigorously the “…anonymous” code of such programs by not even specifying them.) Some have relapsed along the way; some have not—but to varying extents they all remain aware and watchful of the possibility. Some clearly think that everyone would be better in the long run to live the way they currently live; others consider where they are now a personal solution for their own individual predicament that should not necessarily be prescriptive for others.
What they have in common is that they are all, by their own account, for now, living sober. And quite evidently they all strongly believe—whatever their varying reasons and circumstances and perspectives and challenges—that sobriety has made life better.
This is not an article telling anyone how to live; this is not an article advocating the wisdom or foolishness of different paths. It is simply an article in which a diverse group of creative people articulate how their own lives veered off course, and about some of the ways they each found to correct that, and about what they believe they have learned about themselves and about living in the process.
Even for those interviewees who chose to pepper their accounts with wry humor and funny stories, these were not lighthearted interviews. Invariably these were intense and often painful discussions about something each clearly considered a hugely important and central part of who they now are; as they communicated their experiences, they were prepared to dig deeply, and often unsparingly.
And while the particulars they spoke of may be specific to each of them, the wider predicaments and decisions and quandaries and insecurities and dilemmas they spoke of are the same ones that confront us all. No matter which choices each one of us elects to make as we hack through the undergrowth into the future, no matter how like or unlike these lives here might seem to our own lives, I would be astonished—and perhaps a little worried, too—to discover anyone who could read the words these interviewees share without finding plenty to relate to or empathize with, and plenty more to think about.
Some drank, some used drugs, some did more or less everything, and they did so to very different degrees. Some found themselves at the edge of the precipice, or worse; others simply re-routed from a path or trajectory that they came to see as unwise. Some were clean before the end of their teenage years; some only surfaced into sobriety much later in their lives. Some created the work that made them first or best known before they were sober; some have done so since. Some see significant correlations here; some don’t.
In the modern pop-culture tradition, being a musician has often come with a series of default lifestyle expectations, ones of indulgence and recklessness, larger-than-life living, and a diligent pursuit of altered forms of consciousness. Some see these expectations as having played a part in what happened to them, though most ultimately see their decisions and actions as also—if not mainly—a matter of their own psychology and personality and predisposition.Some delight in a dark humor about their earlier excesses; others talk in a way that suggests that to dwell on these too much, to give such memories too much oxygen, would be to take too lightly something they simply can’t risk taking lightly. That it would be foolhardy or perilous to risk returning, even in thought, to a place where for all kinds of reasons they’d rather not linger. A corollary is that some are reluctant in this context to offer much detail about the particular substances that they consumed, or that consumed them, or both. (Readers may be aware that at other times, in different situations or at different stages of their recovery, some of these interviewees may have detailed further specifics about how they used to alter their body chemistry, but GQ is respecting what they have chosen to share in this particular circumstance and setting.)
Some hew closely to the language of recovery programs; some don’t. (Readers may also notice that some in the former category prefer to honor rigorously the “…anonymous” code of such programs by not even specifying them.) Some have relapsed along the way; some have not—but to varying extents they all remain aware and watchful of the possibility. Some clearly think that everyone would be better in the long run to live the way they currently live; others consider where they are now a personal solution for their own individual predicament that should not necessarily be prescriptive for others.
What they have in common is that they are all, by their own account, for now, living sober. And quite evidently they all strongly believe—whatever their varying reasons and circumstances and perspectives and challenges—that sobriety has made life better.
This is not an article telling anyone how to live; this is not an article advocating the wisdom or foolishness of different paths. It is simply an article in which a diverse group of creative people articulate how their own lives veered off course, and about some of the ways they each found to correct that, and about what they believe they have learned about themselves and about living in the process.
Even for those interviewees who chose to pepper their accounts with wry humor and funny stories, these were not lighthearted interviews. Invariably these were intense and often painful discussions about something each clearly considered a hugely important and central part of who they now are; as they communicated their experiences, they were prepared to dig deeply, and often unsparingly.
And while the particulars they spoke of may be specific to each of them, the wider predicaments and decisions and quandaries and insecurities and dilemmas they spoke of are the same ones that confront us all. No matter which choices each one of us elects to make as we hack through the undergrowth into the future, no matter how like or unlike these lives here might seem to our own lives, I would be astonished—and perhaps a little worried, too—to discover anyone who could read the words these interviewees share without finding plenty to relate to or empathize with, and plenty more to think about.
by Chris Heath, GQ | Read more:
Image: Ryan Pfluger
'The Truest Free-Range': Why Its Time to Start Eating Roadkill
My mother texts me four photos of a dead moose the week I leave Alaska. It is freshly hit. The pebbled pink brains fanning across the pavement have not yet grayed in the brisk autumn air. The animal will not go to waste. For the past 50 years, Alaska has been the only state where virtually every piece of large roadkill is eaten.
Every year, between 600 and 800 moose are killed in Alaska by cars, leaving up to 250,000lb of organic, free-range meat on the road. State troopers who respond to these collisions keep a list of charities and families who have agreed to drive to the scene of an accident at any time, in any weather, to haul away and butcher the body.
During a recent trip to Fairbanks, my hometown, I asked locals why Alaska’s roadkill program has been so successful for so long. “It goes back to the traditions of Alaskans: we’re really good at using our resources,” the Alaska state trooper David Lorring told me. Everyone I talked to – biologists, law enforcement, hunters and roadkill harvesters – agreed: it would be embarrassing to waste the meat. In the past few years, a handful of states, including Washington, Oregon and Montana, have started to adopt the attitude that Alaskans have always had toward eating roadkill. A loosening of class stigma and the questionable ethics and economics of leaving dinner to rot by the side of the road have driven acceptance of the practice in the lower 48.
The trooper in my mother’s photo will have no trouble finding someone to take the moose. It’s still daylight, and 200lb of good meat are sitting by the side of the road in Anchorage, the state’s largest city. The trooper may even wait until the salvagers arrive. Otherwise, someone driving by may grab the moose first.
Alaska’s geography, demographics and can-do spirit make it uniquely fit for salvaging roadkill. It is far from the contiguous 48 states, and shipping food can be prohibitively expensive. When Alaska became a state in 1959, it was branded as a loosely governed last frontier where practical knowhow and self-reliance were highly valued. Salvaging large roadkill is nothing if not practical. One moose – 300lb of meat – is dinner for a year. And if the internal organs have ruptured and tainted the meat, or troopers can’t determine the cause of death, then they call dogsledders or trappers. “We have plenty of people willing to take a rotten, nasty moose,” Lorring told me, to use as dog food or bear bait. But roadkill rarely goes bad, the wildlife biologist Jeff Selinger told me. People are quick to report large game collisions, and the cold climate limits wildlife diseases that can make meat unfit to eat. (...)
State-wide bans on salvaging roadkill began in the 1950s, when one in 10 people in the lower 48 hunted; today, it’s only one in 20. When California made picking up roadkill illegal in 1957, the law was supposed to prevent people from poaching by intentionally smashing into deer with their vehicles. Oregon, Washington and Texas passed similar laws. My mother grew up in Oregon during the ban. When food was tight, her father illegally killed deer – with a gun. Like many people, she laughed at the idea of using an expensive car to capture her dinner.
Forty years later, states began repealing their bans, partly to reduce the workload of state-funded highway cleaning crews. Tennessee was one of the earliest to do so. As a state senator, Tim Burchett received national attention when he proposed a bill to let Tennessee residents collect and eat roadkill without a tag in 1999. His prediction that “everyone’s going to make us look like a bunch of hayseed rednecks” was right. A Knoxville News Sentinel headline read “Grease the skillet, Ma! New bill will make road kill legal eatin’”, and a New York Times reporter covering the ridicule revealed his own prejudice when he wrote: “As if a state law were preventing anyone from scraping a happy meal off the asphalt. As if anyone would even dream of it.”
The reporter was wrong: within the last decade, more than five states have lifted or loosened their roadkill restrictions, making eating roadkill legal in more states than not. Today, thousands of people apply for salvage permits each year.
by Ella Jacobson, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: The Washington Post/Getty Images
Every year, between 600 and 800 moose are killed in Alaska by cars, leaving up to 250,000lb of organic, free-range meat on the road. State troopers who respond to these collisions keep a list of charities and families who have agreed to drive to the scene of an accident at any time, in any weather, to haul away and butcher the body.
During a recent trip to Fairbanks, my hometown, I asked locals why Alaska’s roadkill program has been so successful for so long. “It goes back to the traditions of Alaskans: we’re really good at using our resources,” the Alaska state trooper David Lorring told me. Everyone I talked to – biologists, law enforcement, hunters and roadkill harvesters – agreed: it would be embarrassing to waste the meat. In the past few years, a handful of states, including Washington, Oregon and Montana, have started to adopt the attitude that Alaskans have always had toward eating roadkill. A loosening of class stigma and the questionable ethics and economics of leaving dinner to rot by the side of the road have driven acceptance of the practice in the lower 48.The trooper in my mother’s photo will have no trouble finding someone to take the moose. It’s still daylight, and 200lb of good meat are sitting by the side of the road in Anchorage, the state’s largest city. The trooper may even wait until the salvagers arrive. Otherwise, someone driving by may grab the moose first.
Alaska’s geography, demographics and can-do spirit make it uniquely fit for salvaging roadkill. It is far from the contiguous 48 states, and shipping food can be prohibitively expensive. When Alaska became a state in 1959, it was branded as a loosely governed last frontier where practical knowhow and self-reliance were highly valued. Salvaging large roadkill is nothing if not practical. One moose – 300lb of meat – is dinner for a year. And if the internal organs have ruptured and tainted the meat, or troopers can’t determine the cause of death, then they call dogsledders or trappers. “We have plenty of people willing to take a rotten, nasty moose,” Lorring told me, to use as dog food or bear bait. But roadkill rarely goes bad, the wildlife biologist Jeff Selinger told me. People are quick to report large game collisions, and the cold climate limits wildlife diseases that can make meat unfit to eat. (...)
State-wide bans on salvaging roadkill began in the 1950s, when one in 10 people in the lower 48 hunted; today, it’s only one in 20. When California made picking up roadkill illegal in 1957, the law was supposed to prevent people from poaching by intentionally smashing into deer with their vehicles. Oregon, Washington and Texas passed similar laws. My mother grew up in Oregon during the ban. When food was tight, her father illegally killed deer – with a gun. Like many people, she laughed at the idea of using an expensive car to capture her dinner.
Forty years later, states began repealing their bans, partly to reduce the workload of state-funded highway cleaning crews. Tennessee was one of the earliest to do so. As a state senator, Tim Burchett received national attention when he proposed a bill to let Tennessee residents collect and eat roadkill without a tag in 1999. His prediction that “everyone’s going to make us look like a bunch of hayseed rednecks” was right. A Knoxville News Sentinel headline read “Grease the skillet, Ma! New bill will make road kill legal eatin’”, and a New York Times reporter covering the ridicule revealed his own prejudice when he wrote: “As if a state law were preventing anyone from scraping a happy meal off the asphalt. As if anyone would even dream of it.”
The reporter was wrong: within the last decade, more than five states have lifted or loosened their roadkill restrictions, making eating roadkill legal in more states than not. Today, thousands of people apply for salvage permits each year.
by Ella Jacobson, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: The Washington Post/Getty Images
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
One Tab: How to Give Google’s Chrome Browser a Big Speed Boost With One Click
With more than 64% of the global market as of last month, Google’s Chrome browser is by far the most popular desktop web browser by a massive margin. The next closest is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and its global market share totalled less than 11% in December 2018. Chrome is the browser of choice for so many reasons, not the least of which are things like simplicity and speed. When it comes to speed though, things aren’t always straightforward. Chrome is typically lightning fast when loading webpages, but your browser speed can really take a hit when there are tons of tabs open. And if you’re anything like us here at BGR, you pretty much always have tons of tabs open.
Over the years, Google has made plenty of optimizations aimed specifically at improving performance and reducing resource utilization by background tabs. Even still, things tend to slow down — especially on older PCs — when you leave too many tabs open. As it turns out though, there’s an awesome free Chrome extension that lets you give your browser a big speed boost with a single click.
The extension in question is called One Tab, and it’s completely free to download from the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, a One Tab button will appear in your browser to the right of the address bar. Anytime you get overwhelmed by open tabs or your system starts to slow down, simply click the button and all of your open tabs will be closed. In their place, you’ll find a single tab with a list of hyperlinks, one for each tab that had been open. When you need to go back to a page, just select it from the list. It’s a wonderfully simple and effective solution to the problem, and again, it’s totally free.
by Zach Epstein, BGR | Read more:
Over the years, Google has made plenty of optimizations aimed specifically at improving performance and reducing resource utilization by background tabs. Even still, things tend to slow down — especially on older PCs — when you leave too many tabs open. As it turns out though, there’s an awesome free Chrome extension that lets you give your browser a big speed boost with a single click.The extension in question is called One Tab, and it’s completely free to download from the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, a One Tab button will appear in your browser to the right of the address bar. Anytime you get overwhelmed by open tabs or your system starts to slow down, simply click the button and all of your open tabs will be closed. In their place, you’ll find a single tab with a list of hyperlinks, one for each tab that had been open. When you need to go back to a page, just select it from the list. It’s a wonderfully simple and effective solution to the problem, and again, it’s totally free.
by Zach Epstein, BGR | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Has the Government Legalized Secret Defense Spending?
October 4th, 2018, was a busy news day. The fight over Brett Kavanuagh’s Supreme Court nomination dominated the cycle. The Trump White House received a supplemental FBI report it said cleared its would-be nominee of wrongdoing. Retired Justice John Paul Stevens meanwhile said Kavanaugh was compromised enough that he was “unable to sit as a judge.”
The only thing that did not make the news was an announcement by a little-known government body called the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board — FASAB — that essentially legalized secret national security spending. The new guidance, “SFFAS 56 – CLASSIFIED ACTIVITIES” permits government agencies to “modify” public financial statements and move expenditures from one line item to another. It also expressly allows federal agencies to refrain from telling taxpayers if and when public financial statements have been altered.
To Michigan State professor Mark Skidmore, who’s been studying discrepancies in defense expenditures for years, the new ruling — and the lack of public response to it — was a shock.
“From this point forward,” he says, “the federal government will keep two sets of books, one modified book for the public and one true book that is hidden.”
Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy was one of the few people across the country to pay attention to the FASAB news release. He was alarmed.
“It diminishes the credibility of all public budget documents,” he says.
I spent weeks trying to find a more harmless explanation for SFFAS 56, or at least one that did not amount to a rule that allows federal officials to fake public financial reports.
I couldn’t find one. This new accounting guideline really does mean what it appears to mean, and the details are more bizarre than the broad strokes.
The only thing that did not make the news was an announcement by a little-known government body called the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board — FASAB — that essentially legalized secret national security spending. The new guidance, “SFFAS 56 – CLASSIFIED ACTIVITIES” permits government agencies to “modify” public financial statements and move expenditures from one line item to another. It also expressly allows federal agencies to refrain from telling taxpayers if and when public financial statements have been altered.
To Michigan State professor Mark Skidmore, who’s been studying discrepancies in defense expenditures for years, the new ruling — and the lack of public response to it — was a shock.“From this point forward,” he says, “the federal government will keep two sets of books, one modified book for the public and one true book that is hidden.”
Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy was one of the few people across the country to pay attention to the FASAB news release. He was alarmed.
“It diminishes the credibility of all public budget documents,” he says.
I spent weeks trying to find a more harmless explanation for SFFAS 56, or at least one that did not amount to a rule that allows federal officials to fake public financial reports.
I couldn’t find one. This new accounting guideline really does mean what it appears to mean, and the details are more bizarre than the broad strokes.
by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images
Ethan Hawke: The Rolling Stone Interview
[ed. Always seemed like a thoughtful guy. Also, check out Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (with Philip Seymour Hoffman). A favorite.]
Steely Dan
[ed. Love the spidery guitar work (hard to hear on YouTube). Turn it up. See also: Joe Jackson's excellent cover.]
Tuesday, January 15, 2019
Costco Is Selling a 27-Lb. Bucket of Mac and Cheese with a 20-Year Shelf Life
Oh Costco, you’ve truly outdone yourself this time.
The wholesale store just figured out a way to make sure you will never run out of mac and cheese again: sell it in a 27-lb. tub.
You read that correctly, 27 lbs. That’s as much as about 100 baseballs, half a bale of hay or your average 3-year-old child.
The Chef’s Banquet Macaroni and Cheese Storage Bucket now sold at Costco holds 180 servings of the fan-favorite meal.
Piled high in the six-gallon container are separate pouches of elbow pasta and cheddar cheese sauce.
The tub sells for $89.99, which really means you’re only paying about 50 cents per serving. Also, you’re making quite the investment as the product will last a long time—two decades in fact. The shelf life is so long that Costco listed the product under “all emergency foods” on the store’s website.
The wholesale store just figured out a way to make sure you will never run out of mac and cheese again: sell it in a 27-lb. tub.
You read that correctly, 27 lbs. That’s as much as about 100 baseballs, half a bale of hay or your average 3-year-old child.The Chef’s Banquet Macaroni and Cheese Storage Bucket now sold at Costco holds 180 servings of the fan-favorite meal.
Piled high in the six-gallon container are separate pouches of elbow pasta and cheddar cheese sauce.
The tub sells for $89.99, which really means you’re only paying about 50 cents per serving. Also, you’re making quite the investment as the product will last a long time—two decades in fact. The shelf life is so long that Costco listed the product under “all emergency foods” on the store’s website.
by Georgia Slater, People | Read more:
Image: Costco/Amazon
Rodents of Unusual Size
By now, anyone following environmental news recognizes Louisiana as one of the front lines for climate change in the United States. In recent years, writers from the state have famously wondered out loud about whether the boot shape we all learned in elementary school fits anymore, and residents of a small community in Isle de Jean Charles made headlines in 2015-2016 by becoming the first "climate refugees" in the country. Between flooding and the various forces pushing coastal erosion, the town quite literally lost 98 percent of its physical land in the 60 years between 1955 and 2015, forcing a concerted relocation effort.
The causes of this crisis are complex, numerous, and varied—but only one contributor kinda, sorta resembles a real-life Raticate. The large swamp rats known as nutria don’t look anything like the small mice you might take home from a pet store. Larger than small dogs and sporting giant orange teeth capable of doing some damage, most people wouldn’t want to mess with one in close quarters. But many in modern Louisiana don’t have a choice these days, which is where Rodents of Unusual Size—a documentary making its TV debut on PBS’ Independent Lens on Monday, January 14—comes in.
Know the nutria
Back in the early 20th century long before environmental changes imminently threatened the state's natural resources, Louisiana still needed more industry. So businessmen like EA McIlhenny (of the Tabasco family, yes) had an idea. Argentina has this abundance of these large, furry creatures called nutria, what if we acquired some?
The concept seemed solid: raise ‘em on a fur farm, skin ‘em for the pelts, and then export hats, jackets, and other fine furs to make a pretty penny. And for a long time, the scheme worked—even Sophia Loren once wore nutria, and the industry for Louisiana trappers peaked around $15 million in annual revenue. But as animal rights became more of a mainstream concept, the popularity of fur drastically decreased. Suddenly, folks in Southern Louisiana didn’t have the same motivation, and nutria quietly built out a larger population within their new habitat.
This, to put it lightly, had consequences. In the '70s and '80s when the fur game started drying up, Rodents of Unusual Size estimates 25 million invasive nutria occupied Southern Louisiana. Unfortunately, the rats tend to devastate their immediate environment, eating anything green in sight and uprooting plants in the process, which makes a plot of land more at risk to the natural forces of coastal erosion. When combined over time with things like trying to canal the Mississippi and dredging land for the oil and gas industry, it becomes easy to see where the nutria fit in within the larger pending-environmental disaster puzzle.
Rodents of Unusual Size gets through this history as swiftly as a fanboat in order to focus on the now—since recognizing the dilemma, how has the state and the people of Louisiana approached a problem like nutria? The most effective (or at least most documented here) tactic seems to simply be reinstating a financial incentive. In 2002, Louisiana Wildlife & Fisheries instituted a bounty—just on nutria tails, even, so those wanting to utilize the meat or pelts could still double their profits.
There’s impetus to do it for a livable wage—at $5/pelt and the ability to (in good times at least) snag 1,200 or so pelts in a week, the money can be significant despite the tough work—but everyone seems to recognize a greater cause in play as well. “When I grew up this was a jungle, nothing but big oak trees,” says older nutria hunter Thomas Gonzales, who’s lived in Delacroix his entire life (the nutria only came to Delacroix in the 1950s by his account). “When I look out now it looks like a disaster. The nutria took over, and they’re going to destroy the land, so we gotta keep fighting ‘em.”
Today all types of Louisianans get involved, and this documentary sings by simply tagging along with a variety of hunters in order to showcase each one's distinct motivation and approach. Viewers spend time with the elderly and the youth, men and women, entire families, locals of all different racial and ethnic identities including those belonging to nearby Native American tribes. “This is pretty much one of the best college jobs you can do, coming out here is like seeing dollar signs on the land,” says college student Trey Hover. “Each one I kill gets me closer and closer to paying for school.”
And by this point, the nutria have expanded far beyond the immediate coast. Rodents of Unusual Size rides along with animal control specialists who take to the heart of New Orleans and battle these creatures within the city’s canals and sewer system, for instance. One constantly on call expert estimates in a two-mile stretch of canal these days, you’re likely to find at least 300 nutria, which means infrastructure faces more risk via burrowing and humans may have to deal with them showing up at home. “I remember calls to get nutria out of toilets,” the control expert says. “Canal drainage leads to sewer, which leads to toilet. So there’s going to be more human versus nutria conflict.”
The causes of this crisis are complex, numerous, and varied—but only one contributor kinda, sorta resembles a real-life Raticate. The large swamp rats known as nutria don’t look anything like the small mice you might take home from a pet store. Larger than small dogs and sporting giant orange teeth capable of doing some damage, most people wouldn’t want to mess with one in close quarters. But many in modern Louisiana don’t have a choice these days, which is where Rodents of Unusual Size—a documentary making its TV debut on PBS’ Independent Lens on Monday, January 14—comes in.Know the nutria
Back in the early 20th century long before environmental changes imminently threatened the state's natural resources, Louisiana still needed more industry. So businessmen like EA McIlhenny (of the Tabasco family, yes) had an idea. Argentina has this abundance of these large, furry creatures called nutria, what if we acquired some?
The concept seemed solid: raise ‘em on a fur farm, skin ‘em for the pelts, and then export hats, jackets, and other fine furs to make a pretty penny. And for a long time, the scheme worked—even Sophia Loren once wore nutria, and the industry for Louisiana trappers peaked around $15 million in annual revenue. But as animal rights became more of a mainstream concept, the popularity of fur drastically decreased. Suddenly, folks in Southern Louisiana didn’t have the same motivation, and nutria quietly built out a larger population within their new habitat.
This, to put it lightly, had consequences. In the '70s and '80s when the fur game started drying up, Rodents of Unusual Size estimates 25 million invasive nutria occupied Southern Louisiana. Unfortunately, the rats tend to devastate their immediate environment, eating anything green in sight and uprooting plants in the process, which makes a plot of land more at risk to the natural forces of coastal erosion. When combined over time with things like trying to canal the Mississippi and dredging land for the oil and gas industry, it becomes easy to see where the nutria fit in within the larger pending-environmental disaster puzzle.
Rodents of Unusual Size gets through this history as swiftly as a fanboat in order to focus on the now—since recognizing the dilemma, how has the state and the people of Louisiana approached a problem like nutria? The most effective (or at least most documented here) tactic seems to simply be reinstating a financial incentive. In 2002, Louisiana Wildlife & Fisheries instituted a bounty—just on nutria tails, even, so those wanting to utilize the meat or pelts could still double their profits.
There’s impetus to do it for a livable wage—at $5/pelt and the ability to (in good times at least) snag 1,200 or so pelts in a week, the money can be significant despite the tough work—but everyone seems to recognize a greater cause in play as well. “When I grew up this was a jungle, nothing but big oak trees,” says older nutria hunter Thomas Gonzales, who’s lived in Delacroix his entire life (the nutria only came to Delacroix in the 1950s by his account). “When I look out now it looks like a disaster. The nutria took over, and they’re going to destroy the land, so we gotta keep fighting ‘em.”
Today all types of Louisianans get involved, and this documentary sings by simply tagging along with a variety of hunters in order to showcase each one's distinct motivation and approach. Viewers spend time with the elderly and the youth, men and women, entire families, locals of all different racial and ethnic identities including those belonging to nearby Native American tribes. “This is pretty much one of the best college jobs you can do, coming out here is like seeing dollar signs on the land,” says college student Trey Hover. “Each one I kill gets me closer and closer to paying for school.”
And by this point, the nutria have expanded far beyond the immediate coast. Rodents of Unusual Size rides along with animal control specialists who take to the heart of New Orleans and battle these creatures within the city’s canals and sewer system, for instance. One constantly on call expert estimates in a two-mile stretch of canal these days, you’re likely to find at least 300 nutria, which means infrastructure faces more risk via burrowing and humans may have to deal with them showing up at home. “I remember calls to get nutria out of toilets,” the control expert says. “Canal drainage leads to sewer, which leads to toilet. So there’s going to be more human versus nutria conflict.”
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